Because there's not enough usable Lithium in the Earth's crust for car batteries based on that technology, and other battery types are even less efficient than hydrogen.
For the second problem, well, now you're bubbling out all this hydrogen gas from water. How, exactly, are you going to convert that into a usable form? It doesn't do any good as a gas, unless you're in the 1920s airship business. So you're going to have a compressor or cryogenic liquifier system in your home that then transfers liquid hydrogen to your car? Well, maybe. And then there's the whole matter of getting cars to run on hydrogen. I'm not saying these are insurmountable problems. I'm just saying you've still got 90% of your problems ahead of you.
You can store the gas directly to use in fuel cells; no need for a liquid form, since any conceivable way to liquefy it would only reduce the efficiency more. Yes, the tank will leak some of the gas, but losses should be acceptable, and likely won't be worse than trying to liquefy it.
Once you've got hydrogen, getting energy out of it is a solved problem (burn it, fuel cells, nuclear fusion, whatever). It's the getting and storing the stuff that was always problematic.
Storing it in relatively small amounts for a short period may provide acceptable losses. One can imagine a system that fills your tank in the morning, then you drive to work, then drive home, then run any excess back into fuel cells connected to house current (which is still an efficiency loss, of course, just not as big of one). Hydrogen alone isn't stored very long anywhere in great amounts.
Making it as you go would make sense for regenerative braking (preferably with a supercap in between the brakes and the electrolysis machine), and assuming that you don't have a separate battery system (which is likely to weigh more than it's worth in this application).
Or have a source of raw hydrogen, as opposed to extracting it from chemicals that happen to contain hydrogen. Some types of nuclear reactors already give off H2 as a byproduct. Though in that case, the right way to use it is to pump it directly to fuel cells on site and dump the resulting energy onto the grid. Don't bother setting up infrastructure to transport the stuff and for use in cars.
The problems I had with hydrogen is that electrolysis isn't efficient enough, you need expensive platinum or palladium catalysts in the fuel cells, and you either need some exotic storage/transport mechanism made of unobtainium, or you have individual users make their own hydrogen (which makes it even less efficient).
Looks like this solves most of those problems. As long as this nanoparticle catalyst is cheaper than platinum (not terribly difficult), the hydrogen economy might actually have a future.
Linux is gaining on the desktop according to several polls . ..
Yes, the community celebrates every time a poll shows a gain of 1%. And if you step back and think about it, that's really pathetic. Apple community is the same way.
. . . and the reason Microsoft owns the market is due to anti-competitive business practices.
Regardless of how they got it, someone would have ended up having a monopoly in the OS market. Given the choice, I'd rather it not be Microsoft, but it's the monopoly we're stuck with at this point. Maybe the market will move to an area that Linux will dominate. Maybe the EeePC represents that market (which is the direct source of a lot of recent Linux gains), or maybe it will be something else. In any case, we're unlikely to undo the Windows monopoly now.
I gave up on the whole lot years ago when I found that when they talked about stuff I already knew about, it was often completely wrong. Naturally, I then had to wonder about the accuracy of stuff I didn't know about.
Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic.
Many of those apps are based on projects that were originally free (albeit before RMS came around). Nearly all modern OSen are based on Unix in some way, which was first developed in a very open way. Many compilers/interpreters started life free. An awful lot of the programs that make the Internet work have always been free (like BIND and Sendmail). Even word processors are ultimately just fancy bastardizations of the original vi.
Linux is losing the desktop for reasons unrelated to FOSS. Windows was already a firmly entrenched monopoly before anyone bothered trying to push Linux on the desktop. For comparison, both BeOS and Apple are not FOSS, and have been only marginally (at best) more successful than the Linux desktop.
I strongly suspect that the market can only accept one platform solution on the desktop. It takes far too much effort in terms of customer service or code portability to support more than one at a time. Therefore, we may simply have to live with the fact that the Windows monopoly is permanent. Of course, the market may end up marginalizing the desktop without Microsoft being able to make serious inroads on whatever replaces it.
In any case, FOSS has been wildly successful at creating tools-to-make-tools. If you work on embedded systems, you'll almost certainly use a GCC cross-complier, for instance.
What a lot of people on both sides of this discussion forget is that the majority of programmers don't write software that ends up in retail stores. They write software specific to a single business (or a class of businesses). Their code may be so tied up in specific business rules that it wouldn't make sense to transfer it to another shop, even if it was legally viable. FOSS can provide good building blocks for this type of software, even if the final result stays within a single organization.
This will only encourage PETA to make loud press releases about how fish are "intelligent, sensitive creatures" and how the Inuit diet is a source of great evil in the world.
But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre.
No kidding. No matter if he's declared guilty or not, Reiser has a severe case of weird to work out of his life.
I have no idea if he's guilty or not, but I'm pretty sure that the prosecution can't give enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Note that there's a difference between being declared not guilty in a court of law and actually being not guilty.
Air compressors have been around forever, are extremely reliable, and can be manufactured very inexpensively using low-tech materials and methods. If you wanted to get clever, you could even divert some of the torque from the secondary engine to refill the air tanks.
No need to divert engine power. Your engine is already an air compressor. Just don't squirt any fuel in, don't ignite the spark (both could theoretically be accomplished with an ECM flash), and divert the exhaust manifold to the compression tank. The one complication is that, optimally, you'd want to modify the valve timing. Not sure how feasible it is to fit yet another cam profile on modern variable valve timing engines.
Yes, and the 15% for hydrogen solar cells isn't even in the lab. It's a nice number to put into a news story that doesn't yet have full experimental backing.
From efficiencies to transport to storage, hydrogen just has too many practical problems to be usable. We'll almost certainly hit on some other advance in another technology before these problems get worked out.
Note that the number quoted for the hydrogen solar cell is also theoretical. The current one is no where near that. And then there's the hydrogen -> useful energy conversion efficiency to consider. Meanwhile, 40% on normal solar cells is what we're getting in the lab right now, and once in production, we can dump that energy directly to the grid.
The only situations I can imagine where making hydrogen might make sense is where you can't otherwise make electricity. Say, for example, from the waste heat of a nuclear power plant.
Yup, and even there, the best way to use it is in fuel cells on site, not transporting it for use in cars.
Don't you see. It involves HYDROGEN. Hydrogen is THE FUTURE.
Seriously, hydrogen advocates seem to latch on to anything with H2 in it. They never stop to consider that the efficiency of the entire system (often even theoretical ones) is substantially worse than a bunch of other things that already exist.
How many companies exist that would invest in a company that has no actual customers, already in chapter 11, and stuck in drawn-out legal proceedings that it almost certainly won't win? Microsoft has already undeniably helped SCO before, and they do have enough money to throw around that $100 million isn't too much to spend on a longshot.
So even if there's not direct evidence, there's also a very short list of people with $100 million sitting around who would want to invest in SCO. If it's not Microsoft, then I'd like to know who, because I've got a Perpetual Motion Machine for them to invest in next.
There's actually separate copyrights held on the music, the lyrics, and the recording. Bars and cafes with cover bands are supposed to get a license from the songwriter (I believe there's a flat rate available from an industry trade group), but not the recording (since there isn't one).
The "Happy Birthday" song makes an interesting case study of this. The lyrics appear to have a valid copyright, but the music is public domain. A quarter note had to be split into eighth notes to fit the "Happy Birthday" lyrics (originally "Good morning to you"), but this probably isn't enough to justify a new copyright.
The explicitly stated purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, NOT to ensure the lifetime income of works creators.
To be fair, that's the stated purpose in the US constitution, but this is the EU we're talking about. Does a similar written or implied standard hold over there?
Slashdot Mirror
Because there's not enough usable Lithium in the Earth's crust for car batteries based on that technology, and other battery types are even less efficient than hydrogen.
For the second problem, well, now you're bubbling out all this hydrogen gas from water. How, exactly, are you going to convert that into a usable form? It doesn't do any good as a gas, unless you're in the 1920s airship business. So you're going to have a compressor or cryogenic liquifier system in your home that then transfers liquid hydrogen to your car? Well, maybe. And then there's the whole matter of getting cars to run on hydrogen. I'm not saying these are insurmountable problems. I'm just saying you've still got 90% of your problems ahead of you.
You can store the gas directly to use in fuel cells; no need for a liquid form, since any conceivable way to liquefy it would only reduce the efficiency more. Yes, the tank will leak some of the gas, but losses should be acceptable, and likely won't be worse than trying to liquefy it.
Once you've got hydrogen, getting energy out of it is a solved problem (burn it, fuel cells, nuclear fusion, whatever). It's the getting and storing the stuff that was always problematic.
Storing it in relatively small amounts for a short period may provide acceptable losses. One can imagine a system that fills your tank in the morning, then you drive to work, then drive home, then run any excess back into fuel cells connected to house current (which is still an efficiency loss, of course, just not as big of one). Hydrogen alone isn't stored very long anywhere in great amounts.
Making it as you go would make sense for regenerative braking (preferably with a supercap in between the brakes and the electrolysis machine), and assuming that you don't have a separate battery system (which is likely to weigh more than it's worth in this application).
Or have a source of raw hydrogen, as opposed to extracting it from chemicals that happen to contain hydrogen. Some types of nuclear reactors already give off H2 as a byproduct. Though in that case, the right way to use it is to pump it directly to fuel cells on site and dump the resulting energy onto the grid. Don't bother setting up infrastructure to transport the stuff and for use in cars.
The problems I had with hydrogen is that electrolysis isn't efficient enough, you need expensive platinum or palladium catalysts in the fuel cells, and you either need some exotic storage/transport mechanism made of unobtainium, or you have individual users make their own hydrogen (which makes it even less efficient).
Looks like this solves most of those problems. As long as this nanoparticle catalyst is cheaper than platinum (not terribly difficult), the hydrogen economy might actually have a future.
Linux is gaining on the desktop according to several polls . . .
Yes, the community celebrates every time a poll shows a gain of 1%. And if you step back and think about it, that's really pathetic. Apple community is the same way.
. . . and the reason Microsoft owns the market is due to anti-competitive business practices.
Regardless of how they got it, someone would have ended up having a monopoly in the OS market. Given the choice, I'd rather it not be Microsoft, but it's the monopoly we're stuck with at this point. Maybe the market will move to an area that Linux will dominate. Maybe the EeePC represents that market (which is the direct source of a lot of recent Linux gains), or maybe it will be something else. In any case, we're unlikely to undo the Windows monopoly now.
And we all know how accurate those channels are.
I gave up on the whole lot years ago when I found that when they talked about stuff I already knew about, it was often completely wrong. Naturally, I then had to wonder about the accuracy of stuff I didn't know about.
Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic.
Many of those apps are based on projects that were originally free (albeit before RMS came around). Nearly all modern OSen are based on Unix in some way, which was first developed in a very open way. Many compilers/interpreters started life free. An awful lot of the programs that make the Internet work have always been free (like BIND and Sendmail). Even word processors are ultimately just fancy bastardizations of the original vi.
By extension, whoever owns the trees owns the air. Prove to me you're not stealing my air.
Linux is losing the desktop for reasons unrelated to FOSS. Windows was already a firmly entrenched monopoly before anyone bothered trying to push Linux on the desktop. For comparison, both BeOS and Apple are not FOSS, and have been only marginally (at best) more successful than the Linux desktop.
I strongly suspect that the market can only accept one platform solution on the desktop. It takes far too much effort in terms of customer service or code portability to support more than one at a time. Therefore, we may simply have to live with the fact that the Windows monopoly is permanent. Of course, the market may end up marginalizing the desktop without Microsoft being able to make serious inroads on whatever replaces it.
In any case, FOSS has been wildly successful at creating tools-to-make-tools. If you work on embedded systems, you'll almost certainly use a GCC cross-complier, for instance.
What a lot of people on both sides of this discussion forget is that the majority of programmers don't write software that ends up in retail stores. They write software specific to a single business (or a class of businesses). Their code may be so tied up in specific business rules that it wouldn't make sense to transfer it to another shop, even if it was legally viable. FOSS can provide good building blocks for this type of software, even if the final result stays within a single organization.
This will only encourage PETA to make loud press releases about how fish are "intelligent, sensitive creatures" and how the Inuit diet is a source of great evil in the world.
Anybody who might be affected by the system of justice now or in the future.
But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre.
No kidding. No matter if he's declared guilty or not, Reiser has a severe case of weird to work out of his life.
I have no idea if he's guilty or not, but I'm pretty sure that the prosecution can't give enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Note that there's a difference between being declared not guilty in a court of law and actually being not guilty.
Air compressors have been around forever, are extremely reliable, and can be manufactured very inexpensively using low-tech materials and methods. If you wanted to get clever, you could even divert some of the torque from the secondary engine to refill the air tanks.
No need to divert engine power. Your engine is already an air compressor. Just don't squirt any fuel in, don't ignite the spark (both could theoretically be accomplished with an ECM flash), and divert the exhaust manifold to the compression tank. The one complication is that, optimally, you'd want to modify the valve timing. Not sure how feasible it is to fit yet another cam profile on modern variable valve timing engines.
There were a bunch of features that were planned and hyped, but then cut, like WinFS. Or how about a team spending a year designing the shutdown menu?
Vista wasn't really a "premature birth". It's more like putting every other ingredient into a recipe, then trying to fix it by baking it for too long.
Why is it that whenever someone mentions "banks" on Slashdot, the gold bugs start coming out?
Fait currency actually works pretty well as long as everyone just agrees that it works.
40% is still in the lab [for solar cells]
Yes, and the 15% for hydrogen solar cells isn't even in the lab. It's a nice number to put into a news story that doesn't yet have full experimental backing.
From efficiencies to transport to storage, hydrogen just has too many practical problems to be usable. We'll almost certainly hit on some other advance in another technology before these problems get worked out.
Note that the number quoted for the hydrogen solar cell is also theoretical. The current one is no where near that. And then there's the hydrogen -> useful energy conversion efficiency to consider. Meanwhile, 40% on normal solar cells is what we're getting in the lab right now, and once in production, we can dump that energy directly to the grid.
The only situations I can imagine where making hydrogen might make sense is where you can't otherwise make electricity. Say, for example, from the waste heat of a nuclear power plant.
Yup, and even there, the best way to use it is in fuel cells on site, not transporting it for use in cars.
Don't you see. It involves HYDROGEN. Hydrogen is THE FUTURE.
Seriously, hydrogen advocates seem to latch on to anything with H2 in it. They never stop to consider that the efficiency of the entire system (often even theoretical ones) is substantially worse than a bunch of other things that already exist.
How many companies exist that would invest in a company that has no actual customers, already in chapter 11, and stuck in drawn-out legal proceedings that it almost certainly won't win? Microsoft has already undeniably helped SCO before, and they do have enough money to throw around that $100 million isn't too much to spend on a longshot.
So even if there's not direct evidence, there's also a very short list of people with $100 million sitting around who would want to invest in SCO. If it's not Microsoft, then I'd like to know who, because I've got a Perpetual Motion Machine for them to invest in next.
There's actually separate copyrights held on the music, the lyrics, and the recording. Bars and cafes with cover bands are supposed to get a license from the songwriter (I believe there's a flat rate available from an industry trade group), but not the recording (since there isn't one).
The "Happy Birthday" song makes an interesting case study of this. The lyrics appear to have a valid copyright, but the music is public domain. A quarter note had to be split into eighth notes to fit the "Happy Birthday" lyrics (originally "Good morning to you"), but this probably isn't enough to justify a new copyright.
The explicitly stated purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, NOT to ensure the lifetime income of works creators.
To be fair, that's the stated purpose in the US constitution, but this is the EU we're talking about. Does a similar written or implied standard hold over there?
Correction--one less neutron. But we shouldn't let facts get in the way of a good protest.